Shadowed Aurora
by Youkomon
Summary: Katara's spirit may have been developed for the manipulation of water, but her mother's was not. In fact, Kya's spirit was always meant for the ghosts around the campfire...


Based off the beginning part of the Puppetmaster episode when the gang tell each other scary stories and Katara reveals that her mother supposedly encountered the ghost of her childhood friend. Which lead me to the idea that maybe Kya had her own talents...after all Avatar seems to portraits spirits in the real world in a glowing blue colour and Katara does mention that her mother saw Nini as 'blue, like she was frozen'. The only other people who have seen spirits in the real world are Aang, who in most cases is a spirit himself, Iroh, who does bear some unexplained connection to the spirit world and Sokka and Katara when they witnessed Yue becoming the moon spirit. Argueably though, that was a special circumstance since they were situatated in a place filled with spiritual energy and in normal surroundings they seem quite blind to other spirits that only Iroh or Aang can encounter. It seems that normal people can't view spirits in the same way Aang or Iroh can. So how come her mother was someone who could?

Also, I'm going with the spelling of 'Kya' as portrayed in the ending credits to 'The Southern Raiders' instead of 'Kaya'. I don't care what the Nick website says, it sounded like Kya to me in the episode and the spelling of Kaya leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

* * *

With her little gloves, she batters away at the snow that plagues the doorway to her friend's house, fighting against the stiffness of her joints, chanting, always chanting – _I am not a little girl, not a little girl, yes, I am so, so much more-_ and then she plunges her way inside.

**Nini!**

The young girl stares at the weak hisses of a fire that had been burning without any fuel to accompany its mournful atria. The death knoll clutches at her throat in the form of gnashing milk teeth and she bowes her head, even before the blue imprint of a nine year old girl materialises before her –_Kya, I'm so cold, why am I so cold, tell me_ – and knew she was alone with her gift.

"**Nini why are you cold?"**

Kya has been special since the day she was born. Limp and bedraggled in her sleep, she screams as all infants do and drives her mother half-crazy as the nightmares increase. She does not have words to express what she sees but she does not need to when she sees the shadows of plundered tribes and hear the roars of slaughtered dragons. Her eyes become wide and bulging and her mother panics. Later, much later, when she can walk with the fumbling pride of a toddler, she stares at the man who is not married to her mother and glares, seethes with the pulsating rhythm of knowledge. The only two people who should know why are puzzled. Naturally, her mother's husband does not care. Kya learns to grow up, not bothered by the fact that is impossible to see any man as her father, when the only two choices she ever had were already closed off for her. But secretly, ever so secretly, she is.

"**I like the sky at night. It is warm, almost orange, like the fire in our houses. Your house. Maybe that will make you feel warm Nini."**

Hadoka remembers her image against the aurora, pallid rainbows flittering across her skin. She arches her neck back, curved like the ivory tusks of the elephant-whale he will one day conquer and laughs, free and wild in a way that unnerves him. She is like a child, excited as her eyes roam the skies, hungrily scrapping out images only she can see. She tells every one of the relics of their past life, how the sun is the rapist bastard of Agni and why the moon flees his burning gaze and settles into the crooning lullaby of the ocean each dawn. Occasionally she confides in Hadoka that if she squints really hard, she sees strange colours that give way to the future. She says, almost confused that she sees happiness and blood. He thinks she is crazy.

Years later when she is not a girl but a teenager insecure in her own glowing skin, he listens to her breathe against her nightly sky-watching. The backdrop of the light spectrum is almost too much for him to bear but then a waft of stray hair will catch his eye and tug his heart even further out of his chest. He is stupefied when he realises that it is being simultaneously charmed and brow-beaten into joining it's other half under her ribcage. He can do nothing but gape when she marches up to him and demands to know when they are going to get married.

"**I am sorry you will never have children Nini."**

Kya knows her son does not believe in her abilities. He is too much of a realist in the way he shakes his head at her mutterings, turning away and closing his eyes when she rattles her pouch of bones and spreads them against the short, angry flicks of fire. Oh, he still indulges her in a story-telling session but she is saddened at the way his comically large eyes have dimmed and sharpened with age when once they gleamed. She likes to sneak up on him when he is sleeping and kiss his eyelids with the delicate platter of her southern-iced lips. She knows her lips are like rainfall compared to the harsher stomping of the earth-trained mouth that will take over this role of hers one day. She sees her kissing as compensation for the rougher reception he will receive at the hands of his snow-coloured wife who will strikes thorns into his heart. Kya pauses then, because she is a mother, as well as a seer, and smoothes a hand over the family boomerang. She knows that this moment, much like the item she touches, will not be coming back.

"**I'll get help. Stay there Nini!"**

The one thing that has always surprised Kya is that most people believed her when she spun them her tales of faces in the fire and how her ancestors huggled her bones jealously in her sleep. Every now and then the people of her tribe could catch glimpses of the spirit world and only the rare few were born with the ability to see into it. She was the new angakuq, their spiritual advisor and protector, born with the power to keep the evil spirits away from the children. They were relieved; it had been a while since they last had a shaman among them. Kya was not so sure. She could already see that no preparation in the world would be enough to stop her own children being encased in their own personal demons and couldn't help but be puzzled when she saw cheerful grey eyes watching her from beneath the water. She could see her children's souls, blue and electric with promise and she trembled when she saw warriors incarnated in their steps. She wished she had more than her chants and dances to drive their warring natures away. In the end, she only had her words.

"**...I'm sorry Nini...you're dead."**

Strangely enough, words were all she needed in order to save the life of her daughter.

"**It's me." **

It's always been her. Her to see the dead. Her to see what will happen to the living. Her to use words, words to save, words to heal, words to palpitate.

"**Take me as your prisoner."**

Except she has always been a prisoner. And now she will finally take her place in the aurora she has always loved, the aurora that has always made her wild with joy and the aurora that helped Hadoka fall in love with her.

"**ME!"**

_**The word bursts out of Katara, her warrior spirit raging in the blue her mother sought to defy, Zuko behind her and in awe of the perfect dome she builds, an igloo of execution for the one executer who fell from his post. But perhaps there is too much of Kya in her daughter after all, because the arms drop, the water falls and Katara uses words instead of action to drive home the finishing blow.**_

Hadoka does not listen to his mother when she warns him that she cannot bring herself to fully love Kya –"_there's something inside of her, something that distances itself and makes her run away from others and be alone. She has somewhere to be, somewhere to go. I can't get attached; it feels like she'll be leaving soon."_

He laughs and thinks he understands. After all, his wife once scared him with her talk of how destruction and bliss go hand in hand. But he resolves to be the one to keep her close and entwine their gloves together. In pity, his mother hands over her necklace.

One night, it drops from his hand as he stares numbly at the aurora and away from where the rest of the village is setting out candles and driftwood. If he knew what flowers were he would trade his armour for them. But he does not need to. Katara trades her childhood for a whole world of flowers in both the earth kingdom and the fire nation.

"**Go find your Dad sweetie."**

And she does. She finds him broken and hollowing at the rainbows in the sky. She picks up the necklace he has dropped and sets it round her throat like an extra heart.

"**Mom, I'm scared."**

Her spirituality has been developed for water, not ghosts. But still, she talks. She heals. She helps. And she subdues her warrior spirit for just a little while longer. She has a feeling it's what her mother would have wanted.


End file.
